Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Pearl District with Camas Davis, food writer and founder of the Portland Meat Collective. They discuss why bacon has hit the zeitgeist so hard; her interest in fostering an "alternative economy of meat"; her former career writing travel pieces, which invariably and instinctively became food pieces; her education in the "meta-meta theoretical" exploration of food; how meat became cool again, after industrialization made it uncool (and not particularly tasty); her agreement with even the hardest-core animal-rights vegan about the horrors of industrial meat production; growing up in Eugene, where if you weren't vegetarian, you weren't cool; her return from vegetarianism to the meat-eating fold with a bacon meal while teaching in a women's prison; how American got itself into an entitlement mentality about cheap meat thrice a day; the importance of killing animals we eat ourselves, and how she finds some people are better at it than others; her time studying in southwestern

Colin Marshall sits down in the basement of Portland's Hollywood Theatre with Dan Halsted, head programmer there and founder of the 35mm Shaolin Archive. They discuss fake Bruce Lee films; his adventure of rescuing classic kung-fu film prints, including gems like The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter and The Boxer's Omen from a shuttered, junkie-surrounded theater in Vancouver; his youth in a distant Oregon town with 600 people, his move to Portland, and his discovery of kung-fu cinema; how much more kung-fu movies offer than the fighting; the advantageous openmindedness of Portland filmgoing culture; exploitation films and Quentin Tarantino's high-profile love thereof; how different cities react to kung-fu movies, like the robust Chinese turnout in San Francisco or the disappointing attendance in St. Louis; kung-fu movies as a gateway to Chinese culture; 36 Chamber of Shaolin as a gateway to kung-fu movies; the evaporation of celluloid film, and the apparently dramatic shift in the way those under age twenty experi

Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with Jarrett Walker, public transit consultant and author of the blogs Human Transit and Creature of the Shade as well as the book Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives. They discuss how Portland "turned the battleship" toward sustainable transport in that least likely of all decades, the seventies; the city's discovery of its own extraordinary capacity for self-promotion in the nineties; his adolescence there spent in fascination at the buses departing to all their myriad destinations; how thinking about transit makes thinking about cities more interesting; the unfortunate divide between urban design and transport planning; how the North American revolt against highway-building also hampered the construction of transit infrastructure; a city's transportation system as the ultimate test of its citizen's freedom; the close relationship between a city's density and its transit possibilities, and why fantas

Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Montavilla with Kevin Sampsell, publisher of Future Tense Books, editor of Portland Noir, and author of the memoir A Common Pornography and the novel This is Between Us, forthcoming from Tin House. They discuss the meth crime to be found beyond 82nd Avenue; Portland from the vantage point of his childhood in Washington's Tri-Cities; how he met other writers by publishing his own "lo-fi chapbooks"; how one forges one's own unique voice by maintaining their not-giving-a-crap nonchalance; his chronologically un-pinpointable founding of Future Tense and its surprise success with Zoe Trope's Please Don't Kill the Freshman; writing as a kind of martial art, which develops you even if you start out flabby, and which demands its own kind of meditation; how he became a (more) serious reader at Powell's Books; his love of southern writers, and more generally those who combine grittiness and heart; how unimportant he finds sense of place in fiction, yet how much praise he won for "

Colin Marshall sits down at Portland State University with Carl Abbott, professor there of urban studies and planning and author of Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People. They discuss the debate over Portland's status as a "small city" or a "big town"; the distinctive ease of making connections in the city; how modern-day Portland enthusiasts would look at the place before 1965 and see Akron, Ohio; the oft-made comparisons between Portland, Seattle, and Austin; the history and continued presence of agriculture and industry around the "cool Portland" of today; Microsoft and Boeing, the "accidental" companies that made Seattle the younger sibling that out-competed Portland, one with better booms but worse busts; Portland's "conservatively progressive"  politics, and how that sensibility shows up in its light rail system and central library (especially as compared to Seattle's); the relationship between the city's vaunted "livability" and its patterns of diversity; how he came to Portland and whe

Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Slabtown with Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter, the most civilized community on the internet, co-founder of Fuelly, and creator of several other sites as well. They discuss his escape from San Francisco's "goofball startup culture"; what it means for MetaFilter to be "civilized"; his desire not simply to create "a safe place for people to yell past each other"; the importance of keeping personal identity out of debates; the strange backend provided by MetaFilter's question-and-answer service Ask MetaFilter; the second-most popular Ask MetaFilter thread of all time, Colin's own "What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?"; the strange popularity of questions about how to talk to girls, relate humanity, and/or live life, also known as the "forever alone" series; what it takes to become one of MetaFilter's ten worst users, drunk on power or stupidity; the hyperarticulate sourness that makes bad comments on MetaFilt

Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with Mia Birk, author of Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Future and President of Alta Planning + Design, which strives to make biking, walking, and mass transit an integral part of daily life. The discuss exactly how much happier he would have been riding a bicycle to the interview than riding a bus; the way Portland "got the ball rolling" for its cycling infrastructure development in the nineties; the moments of surprising hostility she found upon first pedaling down Portland streets; bicycle infrastructure as a facilitator of cooperation; how to extend enthusiasm for cycling beyond the guys in Lance Armstrong spandex to those who simply need to get somewhere; the ill effects of America's having spent decades incentivizing driving, and exactly how European cities like Copenhagen pulled so far ahead; how she gauges the cycling in a new town, asking first to see "the good, the bad, and the ugly"; the importance of creating conditions of delight for riding in

Colin Marshall sits down in northwest Portland with comic artist and film critic Mike Russell, co-host on the Cort and Fatboy podcast, creator of Culturepulp, Mr. Do and Mr. Don't, The Sabertooth Vampire, and more. They discuss the excruciating process of drawing an interview; his adaptation of a page of David Foster Wallace's "Up, Simba"; what it's like to artistically live-blog the Portland Opera; the unusual robustness of the Portland comics industry, and its incentivization of "putting comics where they shouldn't be"; his current task of drawing a comic for a set of European finance ministers; the origins of Portland podcasting, and how he became a part; how Star Wars formed at least part of his cinematic consciousness, and what it takes to grow up into an astute genre fan; the worrisome effects of nostalgia and "remix culture"; the Portland "put it out there, what the hell" attitude; Portlandia's proper title of Southeast Portlandia, and how Los Angeles still sees the dream of the nineties as alive in th

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Thom Andersen, professor at the California Institute of the Arts' School of Film/Video and director of films including Red Hollywood, the new Reconversion, and the well-known documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, on the truth and falsity of the city's representation in motion pictures. They discuss The Fast and the Furious shooting on his street; the end of the current era of impressive car chases crafted by Nicolas Winding Refn and Quentin Tarantino; H.B. Halicki's original Gone in 60 Seconds, and the importance of its literalism regarding greater Los Angeles' South Bay; how rarely mainstream cinematic interest looks beyond white people of "immodest means," and what the films that do go beyond them achieve (such as the creation of detective films that actually involve detecting); Killer of Sheep, Boyz n the Hood, and the differences between garden-variety "gang movies" and those that truthfully deal with survival; the questions to do with the black population, ban

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's South Beach with entrepreneur, author, blogger, traveler, and learner Ben Casnocha. His latest book, co-written with Reid Hoffman, chairman of LinkedIn, is The Start-Up of You. They discuss the advantages of hanging an IKEA world map on the wall; his ten days of silent meditation and the feeling of enlarged thumbs that resulted; the San Francisco Bay Area's convergence of Californian spirituality and Californian technological intensity; the three Californias: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and everything else; "NorCal" pride and State of Jefferson stickers; being the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and how that got him involved in technology startups to begin with; how where you physically live now matters both more and less than it used to (and who still lives virtually on Livejournal); how loyalty now extends horizontally to your network rather than vertically to your company, and how your identity now comes before your role as an organizatio

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Bernal Heights with Peter Orner, author of the novels Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and the short story collection Esther Stories as well as co-editor of the nonfiction collections Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. They discuss the heightened Americanness of Chicago and what it has offered his literary sensibility; our tendency as Americans, for good and ill, to chase stuff, whether in the city or the suburbs; his fascination with how life simply goes on amid grand (and possibly meaningless) power struggles; how, as a fresh college graduate, he found his was to Namibia; how his experience compares with the fictional Scottish doctor who falls in with Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, especially in the sense of the gnawing burden of non-belonging; life in a country where things slow down, and the space for thought that provides; how Namibia inspired him to wr

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens with Cariwyl Hebert, founder of the community-based classical music appreciation society Salon97. They discuss New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross' hatred of "classical music"; her project of pretension removal and safe-place creation; how she identified a need in the way her work in classical music proved a reliable conversation-ender; developing and implementing the idea of the classical listening party around which  Salon97 is now based; listening party themes that draw attention and/or create tension, and how she strikes the correct balance between too schmaltzy and not schmaltzy enough; having to begin musical discussions with pure opinion, and bringing out the controversial lives of the composers to generate discussion; returning the social aspect to classical music, by beer, wine, or other means; what, exactly, a composer can infuse their music with while keeping it "classical"; the life of the classical music enthusiast in San Fra

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Mission at the Noisebridge hacker space with Stan James, founder of Lijit, creator of the first browser-based massively multiplayer games, co-host of the 7th Kingdom podcast, and author of a book in progress on technology and our minds. They discuss Noisebridge itself and its almost Utopian qualities; how the supernormal stimuli of cat videos create addiction; how his early multiplayer games could created addiction; San Francisco's position as the American city to be in for those with technological interests, not exclusively technological interests; the optimal Mission-style burrito ordering strategy; how we've left the concept of immersion in virtual reality behind in favor of always being at least a little bit on the internet, and how we can see it in the ways we navigate and even date; stepping outside our reactions to new technological developments by going back to Plato; parental disregard for the protocol of Skype calling; his life in Berlin, another city wher

Colin Marshall sits down somewhere in between San Francisco's Chinatown, Nob Hill, and Russian Hill with conceptual artist, experimental philosopher, and writer Jonathon Keats, author of the upcoming book Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age. They discuss his own role as, above all, a fake; his attempt to epigenetically clone such celebrities as Lady Gaga, Michael Phelps, and Barack Obama; Forged, forgery, pursuit of simulacra, and Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes; content's ongoing release from form, and how it sends out the concept of forgery even as it brings it back in; the enthusiastically forged paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Thomas Kinkade's massively replicated, "master highlighted" images; authenticity as it relates to spaghetti and meatballs; San Francisco's intriguing tension between the claims of its own authenticity and its vision of itself as an experimental utopia — or, in his words, its simultaneous tendencies toward the "incredibly smug" and "very insecure"

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Mission with Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial Director at McSweeney's. They discuss security breaches at the McSweeney's office by overenthusiastic fans seeking a physical connection to their favorite publisher of physical books; his tendency to act as "the Joe Lieberman of publishing" in his editorial career, carrying unchanging tastes through changing times; Geoff Dyer, the writer with whom he has worked the longest, and how the subject-independence of Dyer's writing parallels the subject-independence of his editing; the counterintuitively un-self-indulgent qualities of "Dyeristic" prose; memoir booms vampire booms, and the eternal bad-book boom; how he finds the real action in hybrids of fiction and essay, and how those forms provide the surprises that all art should; his life in New York publishing before his homecoming to the San Francisco Bay area, and how he has come to regard the ecosystem/echo chamber of the New York literary scene at a distance; the dominance of

Colin Marshall sits down at downtown San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum with monologist Josh Kornbluth. They discuss the proper pronunciation of the word "monologist"; his simultaneous return to the practice of oboe-playing and late entry into things Jewish; the question of whether Andy Warhol is "good for the Jews," and how he spun it into a monologue; the qualities of faith shared by Judaism and the communism of his childhood, which still releases endorphins when he thinks about it; the difficulty of dragging beautiful, pure abstractions of any kind into the concrete human sphere; Haiku Tunnel, the "FUBU of office workers"; the implicit premise of perhaps most monologues that everything ultimately connects to everything; how to show you've put in the hours on a performance by presenting its artifice just right; building a career in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how the place ratchets the average New York Jew's stress level down from eleven to ten; New York as his own personal primordial ooze; how

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Castro with Daniel Levin Becker, member of the experimental literary group Oulipo, reviews editor at the Believer, and author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature. They discuss whether Oulipo membership impresses the ladies; his earlier, long pre-Oulipo days, when he would make mixtapes consisting entirely of songs without the letter "e" in the title; his fascination with taking mundane patterns, applying enough work to them, and making something pretty incredible; palindromes, beau présent, homophones, metro poems, mathematical constraints, and Greimas squares; his Fulbright-enabled stay in Paris to organize Oulipo's junk, which led to his writing a book on the group, and then to their offer of membership even before he thought he had accrued the necessary literary steez; whether Paris retains its status as a literary-minded young American's dream, and its status as a "literary mindfuck" nevertheless; what Paris legitimizes, including but not

Colin Marshall sits down in a back room in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury with Christin Evans and Praveen Madan, owners and transformers of The Booksmith, and now Kepler's in Menlo Park. They discuss being deemed "corporate refugees" by their employees for their tech consulting past; creating a positive, aspirational experience that doesn't make bookstores seem like broccoli; what they learned from spending date nights in other cities, having dinner and then visiting the local independent bookstores; the importance of offering serendipity, deeply knowledgeable service, and a multisensory browsing experience; how they've come to hold 200 events a year, including their popular bookswaps, born of customers' desire to meet people in places other than bars; what makes Haight-Ashbury something more than a neighborhood where a lot of fun stuff happened a long time ago, and how they made it a first priority to connect with the local community; the parallel non-profit functions of community bookstores, including publi

Colin Marshall sits down in a Wallace Neff dome in Pasadena with visual and sound artist Steve Roden. They discuss whether art can exist without constraints; his enthusiasm for "dumb ideas," such as painting with his mouth; the influence of Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which he found in a gutter as a kid; the inspiration a Jimi Hendrix impersonator gave him, and how he went on to enter the Los Angeles punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties; his punk band's catalog, including such songs as "Kill Reagan" and "Jesus Needs a Haircut"; his skill set consisting primarily of patience and the ability to evolve slowly; working in forms that admit the most failure, and thus produce the most interestingness; the days when he would hang out at the Westwood Tower Records until midnight, and the clerk that gave him an all-important copy of Brian Eno's Another Green World; the beauty of playing an instrument you know nothing about, and of other ideas born of incomplete information;

Colin Marshall sits down in Sliver Lake with Karina Longworth, film writer at the LA Weekly, co-founder of the film-culture blog Cinematical, and author of the upcoming Masters of Cinema: George Lucas. They discuss the public fascination with criticism versus blogging; J. Hoberman's notion of criticism as reporting what it feels like to be in the screening room; how she promoted a version of herself in her blogging days, and what she regrets about doing so; the pre-YouTube video essays she would create in school about Moonlighting, Judy Garland's apocryphal marriage proposal to Frank Sinatra, and Maury Povich; whether it makes sense to ask if we live in an interesting time for cinema, and whether she can even tell through the fog of writing about movies every week; time travel films and the oft-fumbled promise thereof, especially in the shadows of Back to the Future's pop mainstreaming of scientific devices; what she's learned about making Claire Denis and Sion Sono quickly relevant to readers who may well